Corporations are increasingly adopting data-driven business models that use business applications which require access to a variety of different data sources within the corporation. As a result, corporate data network infrastructures have become exponentially more complex as database storage demands have also greatly increased. New data servers of all makes (e.g., Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM, Dell, etc.) and platforms (e.g., Oracle, Sybase, etc.) are routinely being integrated with existing database networks resulting in a veritable menagerie of database server makes and platforms handling the pool of enterprise data within a corporation.
Enterprise network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), such as Sun Microsystem Inc.'s JDBC™ API, act as the glue that keeps this heterogenous mix of business applications and data servers functioning seamlessly together. Network APIs enable applications to have universal data access across an entire network irrespective of the make or platform of the data server being accessed. They eliminate the need for applications to be written specifically for each database server of a particular make or data platform on a given network thus greatly simplifying corporate database network infrastructures.
Currently, network APIs require application developers to manage the specifics (i.e., opening, maintaining, and closing the connection) of the connection to a database server and set the interface for sending query statements (i.e., Oracle Structured Query Language, Sun Query, etc.) to the server once the connection has been established. This needlessly complicates the application code and sidetracks the application developer's attention away from what should be the developer's main task, creating applications that manage the data once it's been populated with data from a database server.
In view of the forgoing, there is a need for a network API that can automatically manage connections and query statement interfaces for accessing database information from networked databases.